Hi. I MCed my first game tonight and it was a blast. I can’t wait for the next session.
The rules are great and really help to make our own telenovela “Les Passions de Xo” (we are french players).
A question about Leverage arose: maybe I missed it, but at the beginning of the game no one has Leverage. In other PbtA games, often the relationships give the equivalent of Leverage (e.g. the strings in Monsterhearts), so it was surprising that it was not the case here. Why this choice? Is it because the flashback moves using Leverage are powerful?
Hi Tom! I’m so excited for people to be playing! Greetings to Les Passiones de Xo!
This was something that we went back and forth on a bunch of times in putting together the ashcan! The initial line that we came to was that we didn’t want the game to essentially begin with a bunch of flashbacks right off the bat, games had tended to slow down a little bit when players were flashing back in their first scenes.
However, as it is in ashcan I’m needless to say very open to critique! The Leverage economy is definitely something I’m testing for! I’d love to hear about your experience with this! Clearly it was something noticeable at your table, did it seem to be missing?
Indeed, I could see how too much flashbacks at the begining could slow down the game. It makes sense.
In our game, it was noticed by the player of La Dona (Antoine Pempie) when he wanted to use her move Was Beautiful Once and couldn’t because she had no leverage at the beginning. It was not a big deal, just kinda disappointing to not see this move in action, but we hope to see it at the next session.
Ooooh, that totally hadn’t occurred to me… It definitely sucks to not be able to use a move that you chose as one of your only two starting moves!
I’m making a note of this right now. That’s a DEFINITE push towards giving Leverage from the beginning!
Now that you’ve gotten one session under your belt, do most/all of the players have Leverage over each other or has it remained too small of a resource?
For the moment, there is not much leverage, but there was 5 players and after the creation we played for 1h30, so it seems normal. The second session will be a better indication.
Fantastic! If anything else comes up or you have more thoughts on things let me know!
As the Belleza, at the end of session 1, I manage to have 2 Leverage over the Doña. I think after session 1, the players have in general 1 Leverage or 2.
Similarly to the Was beautiful once move, I can’t use the Big entrance move during the first session because I fundamentally need a Leverage to use it.
My thoughts are the same as Antoine Pempie : so, we basically decided that the backstory gave 1 Leverage (meaning that you start giving away 2 Leverages, which seems reasonable). As far as I’m concerned, it follows the idea that the audience is catching the telenovela running and some things had already happened previously. So it makes sense that the characters have at least a few Leverages over some of them.
Beside that minor point, the game seems really awesome and the mechanics seems really clever.
Looking forward to session 2! 🙂